Marxism: Where isn't it?

"That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery." 

there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like, 'yeaahhh, but you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go and do something else... who cares and it's all bullshit anyway..' the paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to, because i can say to you 'feeling uneasy? feeling empty? .. here's something you can go buy or go do.' - 

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace speaks of an America ruled by the Pale King of desire (where cash is only a facade, The Player King.) Wallace speaks from a modern Marxist approach in describing how the "constant opposition" (657) that breeds social hierarchy has palsied modern man with so many choices that he defers to but one, the ability to choose in the first place (which he assumes is natural.) In other words, when there is "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,"

(659) an invisible organization is anchored against the seeming chaos of "constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation [which] distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones" (659). The arbitrary valuations of capitalism have become the last isthmus extended between people: they have "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation" (659). These calculations can be measured to the dollar in capital as social relations are mediated by commodities which then become surrogates for the very people that create them, representing"social relation[s], existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour" (664). It is from there that the dollar becomes a key into a world built of more dollars leading to the"common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as value" (667) - it is as if the labor system were an international language. 

Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

This poem by Wallace Stevens reflects a post-Marxian perspective in that it goes in fear of the abstract. Stevens follows Marx in writing a poem that "ascend[s] from earth to heaven" (656) and any spirituality culled from the lyrics is embedded in their very materiality (the poem is purposefully gaudy to achieve much of that immediate materiality.) As Marx puts it, "the phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process" (656) and Stevens is also rebelling against the idealism of Kant and Hegel when he describes the emperor of ice-cream, or the supremacy of the thing-in-itself. When he says "let be be finale of seem," Stevens posits a material reality that inherently contains all of the permutations the imagination can apprehend out of it while maintaining supremacy for the material (it is like Lacan's Real which is there but not to be touched although some of Stevens' work exhibits a sort of spirituality derived from always touching it, oblique as we may fashion ourselves.)

In terms of how the world might sound to Marx, I call upon the experimental composer Harry Partch and the materiality of a sound derived from self-invented instruments. Horrifying.

 Marx. "The German Ideology." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. 

 Marx. "The Communist Manifesto." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

 Marx. "Capital."  ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

 Stevens, Wallace. "The Wondering Minstrels." Blogspot. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/1999/08/emperor-of-ice-cream-wallace-stevens.html>.